I'm a C# developer having worked with .Net since it was in beta. Before that I mainly worked in C and C++. I have been developing commercial software for more than 20 years. I also mess around with microprocessors, but that's just for fun. I live near Cambridge, England and work from home in my 'silicon shed'.

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So my wife needs to run a bunch of different Virtual Machines for her work. Doing that means she can easily clone an existing VM, mess about with stuff and throw it away afterwards if needs be. Then she doesn't need to worry about having left her computer with lots of weird settings at the end of the day.

So she really needed a fast machine with loads of storage for all those VM virtual disk images, and a decent amount of RAM as well.

We looked around, and she went for the Lenovo IdeaCentre K430. It has a 4TB hard disk, a intel Core i7 processor and 12Gb RAM. So there's lots of space for VM disk images there and a nice amount of RAM to run them. We've created a separate partition just for the VMs to be stored on. All that RAM means you can easily dedicate 4Gb of memory to a VM without any worries.

When I got my hands on the machine, there was loads of rubbish pre-installed by Lenovo, so I erased the entire disk, set up my own set of partitions and reinstalled from scratch. But it was a pretty smooth process. I didn't even need the Lenovo driver disk, everything seems to have been detected by Windows 8 automatically.

I was tempted to suggest she tried Linux as the host Operating System, but in the end I decided she'd be happier with Windows.

Using VirtualBox, when you set your VM to run full screen it seems just as fast as the old PC running natively, you don't really notice. So that's pretty good. But I will upgrade to Windows 8.1 as the host OS when it's released, I've been using the Windows 8.1 preview on my tablet and I like the tweaks that have been made.

... and I've virtualised the old PC so I can keep it as a VM, just in case there's something left on it that we need. Yet again Disk2VHD comes to the rescue.